Death by numbers

When Detective Bobby Goren cast one of his customary sidewise glances at a suspect last Sunday night, he would certainly not have been aware that he was signalling the end of a television tradition in far away Australia. Nor would the eccentric detective, played by Vincent d'Onofrio on Law & Order spinoff Criminal Intent, have realised he was on the way to replacing the singing Von Trapp family as a fixture of Sunday night television.

Last weekend, Channel Ten officially farewelled the Sunday night movie tradition, breaking ranks with its commercial competitors and what has become a doctrine of television since broadcasting began in this country.

In a move that is being closely monitored by Seven and Nine, Ten has announced that Sunday night movies are out, and that series, first-run locally produced telefeatures and special events are in on what is still one of the biggest nights of the television week.

The reasons are not surprising, nor is the move unexpected. For years, network programmers have watched the Sunday night movie audience slowly but surely slip away.

"Movies for some time now have decreased in viewer levels, and it's getting worse and worse," explains David Mott, Ten's general manager of network programming.

"It wasn't that long ago that 2 million, 2.5 million people were watching movies on Sunday night. In the early '90s to mid-'80s it was 3 million. The highest rating theatrical movie this year is 1.2 million."

Which is a far cry from 1977 when an estimated 4 million people tuned in to watch the television premiere of The Sound of Music.

The reasons for the decline are not hard to grasp. The boom of VHS and DVD (the latter is currently estimated to be in 51 per cent of households), the revival of cinema-going (90 million in tickets in 2003, compared to 68 million a decade earlier), the advent of pay TV, video games, the internet and a steady wave of popular drama programs on the ABC have contributed to the decline in currency of Sunday night movies on the commercial networks.

Prior to the video-shop boom of the 1980s, movies made a swift trip from cinema screens to television. These days it takes as long as three years for a movie to trickle down the distribution chain, from cinemas, to video shops, own-your-own DVD and pay TV. As Mott puts it: "By the time movies get to television now, they've got whiskers on them."

In abandoning the Sunday night movie, Ten is following the lead of broadcasters overseas. US networks have been filling their weekend primetime schedules with series for several years now. Sunday night in front of the television in the US typically consists of The Practice, Law & Order, Crossing Jordan, Alias and popular comedy series. The only exception is CBS, which occasionally airs a world premiere of a domestically produced telemovie.

For the past 12 to 18 months, Ten has experimented with its Sunday night schedule, programming one-off Law & Order spin-offs, Australian tele-features such as Go Big and BlackJack and specials such as the Comedy Festival Gala. The strategy worked. Go Big and the Comedy Festival Gala won their timeslots; BlackJack tied the timeslot nationally, and was just pipped in Melbourne.

"This is not about trying to be first," Mott elaborates, "this is about looking for opportunities and a market need. Eventually, all of us, in my view, or at least two of us, will have series or event pieces on Sunday nights.

"There is no doubt that series is where the future is at, because they are unique properties that have never been seen before. We are also developing a large slate of unique, Australian-produced movies and event pieces; Jessica, BlackJack, two high-end miniseries, which are potentially cheaper to invest in than buying a theatrical feature from a studio. We have no doubt that the strategy is right for us."

The Seven Network's experience with the blockbuster Titanic bears out many of Mott's claims. Seven reportedly paid $5 million for rights to director James Cameron's Oscar-winning epic. It premiered on a Wednesday night in mid-2001 so it wouldn't be up against the Big Brother juggernaut. Titanic was the sixth most-watched program in Melbourne that week, eclipsed by Surprise Chef, Harry's Practice, Getaway, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and ER, all of which, notably, constitute regular programming and - apart from ER - are locally made. Despite Titanic's cachet and reputation, its premiere attracted 1.7 million viewers nationally, less than the number of viewers who tuned to Notting Hill, Six Days, Seven Nights and Paperback Hero during 2001, and a mere 100,000 viewers ahead of the umpteenth re-run of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Ten is banking on its new US Navy forensic investigation drama NCIS (wags are calling it 'JAG under water') as well as the most recent series of Criminal Intent to kick off its new Sunday night line-up. It will be home to the new Bryce Courteney-based miniseries Jessica, three more instalments of BlackJack, the Claudia Karvan-Rebecca Gibney telemovie Small Claims (a further three of which are in development) and psychics-solve-crime franchise Sensing Murder.

Nine's Melbourne programming manager Len Downs admits that he will watch with interest Ten's move, but insists that Nine will not remove movies from its Sunday night line-up at this stage. "Good movies still do the job," he says, citing Melbourne viewing numbers such as 400,000 for a recent repeat screening of A Civil Action and a 500,000 peak when Exit Wounds won its slot.

Impressive those numbers may be in the current climate of declining free-to-air viewing, but they still represent a sharp drop on the audience numbers of four or five years ago, or, for that matter, the 550,000-plus viewers Nine regularly attracts to CSI on Wednesday nights.

Downs sees risks in Ten's strategy. "You need to have a lot of series television to fulfil the demands of the slot, and you need to have something to play off the back. What happens at 9.30pm? I would hate to think you get a decent figure from 8.30pm to 9.30pm, and then have nothing to put in afterwards."

Some advertisers, he adds, like to be associated with movies. And while to many it may make sense to watch the Sunday night movie without commercial breaks and in DVD quality courtesy of the local video shop, movies are still a convenient and attractive proposition to many viewers, particularly those who don't have a DVD player or pay TV, Downs believes.

By a remarkable coincidence, Seven departed from its Sunday night movie last week to premiere The Ultimate Transformation, a localised version of Extreme Makeover that may be spun into a series if it rates well. Seven Melbourne program manager Jamie Martinovich says that the air date was set long before he knew of Ten's plan, and that Seven at this stage will rely on movies as well as event programs on Sunday nights.

But he admits the network has contingency plans and has earmarked both new and existing product to put into that slot should it decide to go the way of Ten. "Ask me on June 2, a month after Ten's move, what we will do. We would be reluctant to go down that road not knowing what the numbers are, and would not want to give Nine a free kick with only them screening movies on Sunday nights."

Martinovich believes that Ten has been forced to program series as it no longer has a source of movie product, and foresees problems for Ten if audiences do not latch on to the series it programs (Mott says that Ten did not renegotiate its contract with Columbia at the end of last year in light of this anticipated programming strategy).

But the decline of Sunday night audiences ignores a still bigger question that the networks are reluctant to discuss. Where are the viewers on what has traditionally been television's night of nights? Green Guide columnist and ratings analyst Ross Warneke barely pauses to answer: they're watching DVDs and pay TV.

Data provided by advertising sales company MCN confirms at least part of this assessment. The three commercial networks have lost more than 9 per cent, or 323,000, of their viewers nationally in the Sunday 8.30pm-10.30pm slot between the first rating periods of 2001 and 2004. During this same period, the pay TV television audience has grown by 42 per cent, or 185,000 viewers. Subscription television's biggest gain, some 95,000 viewers, has been in the 55-plus demographic, while the free-to-air networks' biggest loss, roughly 200,000 viewers, has been the core 25- to 54-year-olds.

While Sundays remain among the week's top three or four television viewing nights, it hasn't been the top night for 10 years or more, says Fusion Media managing director Steve Allen.

Middle to young viewers are not viewing as much or as consistently, he says. Saturday nights have suffered the most, and "something similar but less dramatic is happening on Sundays. Those people are using time in a different way. Instead of watching 16 hours of TV, they are watching 12, and it's a matter of which two, three or four hours get axed."

Allen believes that, with the right programs, it's possible that the changes to the Sunday night schedule will bring back viewers, but it won't be like the days of old when the family gathered around the television on a Sunday night with a bowl of soup and toast.

"The vast majority of households, 70-something per cent, have two sets or more, so the family might all be home but they won't agree on the same things to watch, so off they go, particularly if they have pay TV - and a lot of families do have pay," says Allen.

"Sunday night has been a pretty lazy night post 8.30 for television viewing, mind you. From 7.30pm onwards both the ABC and SBS quite vigorously compete, and if you look closely you'll see that ABC and SBS have done quite nicely on Sunday night, but neither has had a classic Sunday night movie format."

Movies won't disappear entirely from network schedules, Mott believes. "You may well find a mid-week movie somewhere, or that Monday becomes more of a movie night, or Thursday," he says. Channel Seven has just announced a series of big-ticket movies for Thursday nights that includes Shanghai Noon, Deuce Bigalow and Gone in 60 Seconds.

What is certain, however, is that a new battleground has opened in the networks' continuing battle for eyeballs and advertising dollars.

"Every slot is a battleground," Martinovich says. "We try to do something different all the time. But this is the first time I remember that everyone has begun to reconsider Sunday nights. Whether it works, time will tell."

Mott has no doubts about the strategy and thinks Ten won't be alone in turning its back on the Sunday night movie: "There is no question that at some point in the future we will be competing with one or two other networks who are putting up series in that slot. We are conscious of that, but believe we are right with the strategy."